I want you to picture someone laying on their side in that really cliche way
You know the one: How the loud kid in a class or club would always try to pose when you took a picture. Maybe that’s not a universal experience but I feel like it is. In this imagined scenario, the person is literally, lateral. Ok, sorry, I’ll stop. The point is, sometimes you can’t go up or down, you can’t go forward or backward, you can only go sideways. If you’re on a webpage think about what’s to the side of your current tab. If you’re anything like me, it will be 15 other tabs. Now if one of these other tabs is a search page, you can use it to fact check the page you were just on. That’s basically a summary of Chapter 4. I don’t want to oversimplify this but my understanding of this chapter was that it was a reiteration of the idea you need to fact check sources or at least search the source and see if it seems to be generally reliable.
The one other thing that stuck out about this chapter was the idea of practicing click restraint. Essentially you should look at what kinds of results appear on the search page and what kind of sources they come from before you commit to reading one. I think most people already do this, especially since most of us are searching things all the time but it can be beneficial to be more conscious about what we do and why we do it.
I have a question
Do you remember that time you embarrassed yourself in a conversation because you thought you knew what everyone else was talking about but you didn’t? Yeah, so do we: kidding, everyone else forgot right away. Unless, of course, it happened online. Then it will probably haunt you forever. The point is, we can learn from our real life mistakes in order to avoid looking dumb online. Unless you’re Paris Hilton and can make money by playing dumb, in which case I would encourage you to go for it.
Caulfield and Wineburg really just seem to be reiterating the point that you need context which isn’t surprising when you consider that the first chapter was all about different types of context and why they matter. This chapter quite literally just covers those same three contexts (occasionally expanding of talking points but for the most part, reiterating them) using slightly different language and a couple of examples.
Maybe I have a problem
I don’t want to be a downer here and I do think that there were a few good points in the readings but it really did seem like the authors are repeating the same basic points over and over again so I’m interested to see where the book goes from here.
Comments
2 responses to “Flip Your Laptop and Read this Sideways”
I totally get what you’re saying about the repetition in the readings—it feels like they keep circling back to the same points, just reworded. But maybe that’s the point? Like the whole idea of fact-checking and using context is so essential that they’re drilling it in from different angles. I think it’s a bit like muscle memory; they want us to instinctively fact-check before we click on anything or assume we know what’s going on, especially online. Also, I laughed at the Paris Hilton comment! You’re right though—most of us don’t have the luxury of monetizing ignorance, so we’ve got to stay sharp!
I enjoyed your title, it caught my attention and caused me to read your post. I completely understand what you are saying about the book repeating itself. How many different ways can they tell us about SIFT? I appreciated the analogy you opened with. Instead of repeating what they said about going lateral, you mixed it up and had us curious what point you were going to make. It is an extremely important point to make that we do not know everything and it is better to hear multiple opinions, but this book has got to have more applicable information in store for us.